"[Maryanne] Wolf resolved to allot a set period every day to reread a novel she had loved as a young woman, Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi."

"It was exactly the sort of demanding text she’d once reveled in. But now she discovered to her dismay that she could not bear it. 'I hated the book,' she writes. 'I hated the whole so-called experiment [of testing whether she'd lost the ability to read deeply].' She had to force herself to wrangle the novel’s 'unnecessarily difficult words and sentences whose snakelike constructions obfuscated, rather than illuminated, meaning for me.' The narrative action struck her as intolerably slow. She had, she concluded, 'changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels, which forced me constantly to go back and reread the same sentence over and over with increasing frustration.' She had lost the 'cognitive patience' that once sustained her in reading such books. She blamed the internet."

From "Just Read the Book Already/Digital culture doesn’t have to make you a shallow reader. But you have to do something about it." (Slate).

The movie ads in the lower right corner of page 39 of the NYT on September 24, 1973.

I was idly leafing through this issue after an unsuccessful archive search — doesn't matter what for — when I noticed this strange collection of movie ads. Click to enlarge:



How odd, the crude porn ads mixed with lofty stuff — "Siddhartha" (the 1972 movie based on the Hermann Hesse, filmed in Rishikesh with cinematography by Sven Nykvist) and Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet" — and iconic popular films — "American Graffiti" and "Enter the Dragon." What was "The Spook Who Sat by the Door"? "Spook" had the double meaning: the man character is black and a CIA agent.

I lived in NYC — I was 22 — and I saw many of the movies that came out at the time, but I only saw 3 of the movies depicted there — "Romeo and Juliet," "American Graffiti," and "The Grande Bouffe" — a lavishly praised French comedy about a group of men who commit suicide by overeating: